What an insanely cool trip. Or “amazing”, which someone joked was the key word of the entire retreat. Maggie and Laura, you ladies throw one hell of a party.

I have a lot to catch up on (and I have CLEARLY failed at NaNoBloMo), but I wanted to say this because it’s important, I think, that everyone remembers this is still an option:

I opted out of the backscatter imaging at LAX. You probably know about these controversial machines the TSA has been rolling out to more and more American airports in the past few years that allow screeners to see under clothing to detect weapons. The fact that loads of people are totally fine with screeners seeing them naked is distressing to me, honestly, but I can kind of see how one would think it was not a big deal, either.

What really concerns me, though, is the radiation. The TSA and company that makes them (obviously) claims they are safe, but scientists – and not the ones funded by the manufacturer of the machines, the independent ones – have said they are not good for humans. I’ve known for a while I would refuse to go through one, but have successfully avoided them until Sunday evening.

“Sorry,” I said, bracing for some sort of fight and knowing it would be inconvenient for the workers. “I have to opt out.”

There was no fight, and everyone made a big show of being Professional. I was ushered through to a separate screening area, and a woman* patted me down. It was fine; it helped that my pants sit lower on me so she couldn’t quite get all up on my crotch, but I wonder how that would play out if I had a skirt on.

She asked why I opted out, and I told her I didn’t trust the machines, that science says they aren’t safe, and she answered that the images aren’t saved on the machines and I only viewed for a moment by someone who isn’t even in the room.

Right. Are you scratching your head, too? She addressed a concern for privacy instead of safety, and it was almost as if she reached for a canned answer in her brain and selected the wrong one. Still, I smiled, nodded, and made my way to my gate, Libertarian sensibilities mostly intact.

Don’t forget, you have the option to “opt out”, too. Just make sure you say those two words, and it should be fine.

*I have no idea how they select a screener when someone has an ambiguous gender, or none at all.

If Question 1 fails and LD 1020 is allowed to take effect, marriage will be redefined to be about any two consenting adults without regard to gender, the focus being only about what the adults want for themselves, and not what is best for society as a whole…The reliance on marriage as an important fabric of society will no longer matter…

This is so weird to me! Americans hate communism, but this sentiment is a fully communist sentiment. The point of marriage is ONLY about what the adults want for themselves. I didn’t say “I do.” to “society as a whole”. I said it to ONE person, and it wasn’t for the greater good, it’s because he has a big penis I love him. Also, if I didn’t have the state’s permission to marry him, I’d have done it anyway. Spending my life with Rob is worth going to jail for. I’m so thankful that isn’t the case.

A wealth of examples have been identified by legal scholars who have pointed out the conflicts that will arise between the rights of people who sincerely disagree with homosexual marriage, and the rights of homosexual couples to demand that the state enforce gay marriage whether people support it or not.

I agree that the rights of people who sincerely disagree with homosexual marriage need to be protected. Case after case have already been brought to court involving wedding professionals (especially photographers and clergy members) who refuse to work on gay weddings, citing their religious beliefs – or their simple disgust – and this is not right.  (Sidenote: although it angered as a human, I also support Ken Bardwell‘s decision to refuse to marry two people of different races as being his right as an American citizen.)  But they’re wrong; LD1020 was written with clauses put in specifically to protect those people.

Most troubling is the impact on children, particularly as the public schools begin the process of indoctrinating them on the subject of homosexual marriage.

These consequences are not hypothetical – they have already occurred in states like Massachusetts where homosexual marriage has been legalized.

In Massachusetts, which legalized homosexual marriage, children in second grade are taught in public schools that “same-sex marriage” is the same as traditional marriage, that they can grow up to marry either a boy or a girl, that either option is the same. What’s more, parents cannot opt their children out of such “instruction.”

Well, that’s what you get when you ask the government to educate your children. They get taught things the state thinks is best, not the parents.  Also, I’m calling a foul: shameful use of quotes to make your concerns seem about something more sinister.

In the end, the losers yesterday are the people who are stopped at the emergency room doors as their loved ones lay dying just beyond, the parents who loose the rights to their children because they aren’t “really the parents”, and the families who don’t have the protection that I’ll get to have as a mom when I have kids.  It’s so scary.  It’s so wrong. Where’s the protection for those that need it the most?

I leave you with this. It’s from Ireland’s campaign to legalize gay marriage.

One of my left-leaning friends forwarded the following to me:

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the Public Power Monopoly regulated by the US Department of Energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the Municipal Water Utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US Department of Agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the Food and Drug Administration.

At the appropriate time as regulated by the US congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Atandards [sic] and Technology and the US Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issed [sic] by the Federal Reserve Bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.

After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and fire marshal’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all it’s valuables thanks to the local Police Department.

I then log on to the internet which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration and post on freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right.

The implication, of course, is that government institutions are wonderful, and without them we would have miserable lives.  I read this shaking my head, because for every government agency listed that is designed to solve an issue (safe food, education, security) there are wonderful free-market alternatives that would work so much better.  I hesitate to list them all because it’s going to offend someone deeply, someone who has benefited from one of these government programs, who is convinced that they would be homeless/sick/uneducated/unemployed/dead without them.  Even my husband disagrees with me (which is what I get for marrying a Democrat!), and I’ve given up trying to change people’s minds about it.  People WANT to have things regulated by the government (people, of course, who aren’t me).

One thing that really puzzles me, though, is this: To the folks who are horrified at socialized health care but have no problem bringing your children up with socialized education (aka public school) I gotta ask: why?  I think both are egregious levels of “taxation without representation” (theft), but if someone stole, oh, let’s just say 40% of what was in my paycheck, and said they were going to use the money to fund either education or health care, and I got to choose what my stolen money was going to go to, I’d pick  healthcare.  Is it just a matter of “the devil you know”?  Why the double standard?

I got the bill from the hospital for $654. “Yikes,” I thought. It’s expensive to get sick with no insurance. But, ok. We’ll deal.”

I got another bill for $2074.23 after that, and I figured they had my account mixed up with someone else’s, because I had already gotten one bill that was much less.

It turns out the $654 is for the doctor, and the second bill was for the hospital itself.

TWO Bills! Even so, I told the billing department that since there were no xrays, CAT scans, or ultrasounds done on me, they must have made a mistake; there was no way I could have generated a two thousand plus hospital bill. They didn’t. It’s $1000 to be admitted and, apparently, $1074.23 for the blood, urine and strep test, making me think we should get rid of the studio and set up a phlebotomy lab.

We got the payments reduced to monthly installments, but this is still a huge blow, considering there is nothing wrong with me that warranted a trip to the hospital at all. And I know why the bill is so inflated – I’m being charged for every other person who went to the ER and skipped out on their bill. I’m not planning on adding to the problem by skipping out on MY bill, but it makes me really angry. WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE AND WHY ARE YOU FUCKING UP THE MEDICAL SYSTEM?!

I took an unscheduled blogging break because after the long weekend was over I was still recovering from the Fever and the Laying Around, so the most riving thing that happened is that the laundry piled up like woah and now I can’t walk in my living room with out stepping on dirty clothes. I went to the beach, though! On Memorial Day we kidnapped Nicole and drove to Coney Island where they have the official freak show and an unofficial one consisting of the riff-raff of Brooklyn that comes out of the woodwork to hang out in too-small bikinis on the boardwalk.

Yesterday Rob and I joined the march against Prop 8 through Manhattan. My feelings, of course, are, have always been and always will be that state-sanctioned marriage is a bad idea to begin with, but if it’s the only system in place to protect the families of homosexuals, I’m going to cheer for equal rights in the deeply flawed system. I’d love to change the system all together. Maybe one day.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my “name” issue and reached a conclusion. But I gotta ‘splain, so check it, yo.

There were a lot of you all in favor of me switching to Rob’s last name. I like the concept in a vacuum, but my point of hesitation is the one where everyone thinks: “Oh, she just took his name because she’s the woman and he’s the man.”

Also, I’m 27, and this is my third name. That’s an average of being named less than once a decade. Enough already, you know! In each case, the name was given to me because of a man handing it down, and that makes my feminist sensibilities twitch. I’ve never had my “own” name, and while that’s not the biggest deal in the world, it bothers me a tiny bit.

Najla pointed out that I could take this opportunity to switch my last name to whatever I wanted, even though I’m married. It had occurred to me, too, but I dismissed the idea as being too… something. Maybe the word is just plain “lonely”. I realized that the end of the day, I not only want a new name, I really do want to share a name with Rob, no matter how clunky the end result is. There are three options for that: he changes his name to mine, I change my name to his, or we both pick something new. Because of his family ties, he isn’t willing to change his name, and I respect that.

So that’s part one.

Part two.

This is not a photo of me.  Duh.

We do have the same name, though.  Amber Lynn came (hehe!) onto the porn scene in 1984 (I was born in ’82), and is one of the better known porn stars, even today (partly because of her charity work). As you can imagine, my middle name doesn’t see the light of day much.

It was chosen for me because it’s my mother’s middle name, and Amber Lynn is pretty enough I suppose, porn connotation aside, but as long as I’m shedding old names, I figured, why not get rid of the moniker of this porn star and make a new name for myself? It will also be nice not to have the middle name of someone who told me I was worthless and stupid, and left scars on my body from the physical assaults.  You know?

So that’s part two.

Part three, of course, was picking a new middle name, which I narrowed down to two requirements:

1. It had to sound plausible as a last name. This clears up the whole “I’ve never had my own last name” issue, at least to my satisfaction. To get a good list to choose from I went to babynames.com and looked at the names considered gender neutral. This worked well; virtually all made great sounding family names.

I wanted it to sound like a surname so that it reads as a maiden name, sort of like Hillary Rodham Clinton (no hyphen). I like that; you can call her Hilary Clinton, but if you’re being proper, you use all three names, and that’s how I’m treating the middle name for me, too. Holly inadvertently gave me this idea, and I’m giving that my own twist.

2. The second requirement is that it just had to start with M. Here’s the part you start wondering what I’m smoking, but bear with me. The M is a sturdy letter, visually. It has two strong, wide-set feet. You pronounce it only one way as far as I know; the M knows what she’s all about. By using a lot of them, you can say “yes” in a sassy way, as in “Mmmmmhmmm!”, and the “Me and My M” song was always my favorite Sesame Street cartoon. (If you think this last bit, a one and a half minute song from Sesame Street, could not possibly have factored into my picking a name for myself, you are so wrong.)

So there it is. I go to probate court in my official hometown of Trumbull, Connecticut, turn in the papers, swear I’m not trying to commit fraud, write a check and I am newly, legally christened. (And yes, I’m a libertarian and think that having to file with the court to “officially” do ANYTHING is ridiculous, but that’s the way it is.)

The hardest part about all this is You.

Well, maybe not YOU, but someone.  Someone isn’t going to “get it”.  Someone is going to hear what I’ve done, and they’re going to roll their eyes.  Someone is going to call me silly, stupid, and over-dramatic.  Someone is going to make fun.  And I get it, because as much as I believe in this, I am fully aware that it is “weird”.  It doesn’t feel weird to me, it feels wonderful!  But it IS weird, and I’m self-conscious of that. I’m blessed with a pretty thick skin and the full knowledge that not everyone needs to approve before I do something, but it is still going to be really hard to break this news to the more judgmental people in my life who will need to know. (Though I called my grandmother and told her, and she’s pretty happy, and Rob is happy, so haters be damned!)

So! WHAT THE HELL IS IT ALREADY?! Ready?

Amber Marlow Blatt

OMG! I typed that and now I’m crying! I’m happy! Please be happy with me!

It’s a big name, I know.  A mouthful.  The name equivalent of unbuttoning my pants and letting my big old belly hang out, standing in the middle of the room with my feet planted in a wide stance (just like the letter M), stopping up the flow of traffic at the house party, I’m-in-your-way-and-I-like-it kind of name. The Marlow softens it, I think, kind of a cushion to your forehead after the Amber, and right before the Blatt knocks you, twack! like a two-by-four. It’s quiet, and warm and solid.

Everyone has to make their own path in life, I just wish that mine wasn’t so strange, sometimes. In the end, though, if I get to be here, it was worth it. Plus, hey! It’s the Amber show. I can do whatever I want.

Rock.

When I wrote my post on gay marriage, my personal feelings were so far beside the point I didn’t bother bringing them up, because, really, I can just go fuck myself with my feelings, and so can everyone else for that matter. No one needs MY permission to consider themselves married, our yours, or the pope’s, or the govenment’s or anyone else’s.

But since I was asked: if you are an adult and would like me to view you as married to another adult (and they feel the same way about you, of course!) I will. In MY eyes, you don’t need a license from the government, or to have had a ceremony in a church, or at all, or be any specific religion or religions or a certain race or color or gender. If you tell me you’re married, you are.

And do I wish that the government would allow gays to marry? Yeah, because in this (shitty) system we live in, it will make your life so much easier. Being legally married means that you can adopt a baby, or have one “the old fashioned way” and be able to keep the child that you raised but that isn’t biologically yours if your spouse dies. It means the government steals less money from you taxes you less. It means that, god forbid, you won’t have to spend the last five minutes of your spouses life pleading at the doorway of an emergency room to see them before they slip away forever after a sudden car crash. I get why this license that I have is so sought after. There’s good in the bad. It’s a lot of pitiful offerings from a horrible system, but it’s what we have.

Well, wait. It’s not what YOU have. You’re gay, and so was your husband, so you’re the one fighting the court system from ripping your family apart because it was his sperm that made your daughter. That sucks. It sucks so hard, and it’s criminal. I get it. And I’m so, so sorry. But, like the black folks have said for years: we shall overcome. Not everything. And not always, of course; even the black folks are still hated sometimes (a lot). But eventually we’ll get somewhere. We shall overcome.

UPDATE: I guess my point was that, rather than have more people opt into a bad system we should make a new system altogether; one that could not, by nature, exclude anyone.

PS -
Ditto Keith Olbermann

This is what I believe with every fiber of my being: I disagree with the idea of government being a part of marriage. The ONLY reason I am legally married is because it was important to Rob and our families. Since the beginning of human civilization, marriage has always been in the eye of the community, not the government. If the community did not recognize you as married, you were not. If they did, you were. The government stepped in relatively recently, and began issuing licenses for marriage as a way to keep tabs on people and control them. You know how I feel about that. (Thumbs down!) Remember, “license” is another word for “permission”. If the government didn’t approve of two people getting married, they would not give permission.

At some point, a government issued license became the hallmark of “marriage”, NOT the social recognition it always had been throughout human history. What this did was allow certain people who would have NEVER gotten society’s permission to be married to wed, most notably inter-racial couples. (Interesting to note, a mere 42 years ago, MY inter-racial marriage would not have been recognized by the government as valid.) That sounds fantastic, but it also changed the definition of marriage to be “a state of monogamy recognized by the government” instead of a covenant between two people in the eyes of God/god/whatever religion and community.

The problem now is that when people who wish to be married cannot by legal terms, society will not allow them to be married, either. Two people cannot just say, “We are married.” and have their community say, “Yes, they are.” which is how it SHOULD be, and IS in a truly free society. Now, they have to prove that the government has given them permission to be married before society will recognize them as married. It’s backwards and reversed. It’s not changing anything in people’s hearts, either.

If the government eventually allows two people of the same gender to marry, there will still be people who say, “I don’t care. I will NEVER recognize those creeps as married!” Conversely, if they never do, there will always be people who will accept, without the least bit of hesitation, two women saying, “We are married.”

I would like to see us taking marriage, in all its forms, away from the government, and putting it back in the eyes of society where it belongs.